Dieting books are full of stories of how to eat a balanced diet, savour your food, and generally improve your life. It is not only the dieting industry that is involved in dieting projects. Dieting, especially in the extreme, can be harmful to girls who are still developing. Restrictive diets deprive girls of the wide variety of nutrients their bodies need to grow properly. Dieting Makes You Fat proposes seven golden rules for losing weight, the most salient being to take lots of exercise and eat plenty of fresh, whole foods. He writes from experience, having jumped on the dieting wagon at a young age himself.

Dieting isn't just about what you eat, it's about your entire life as a whole. Some of the energy that used to be caught up in frequent snacking is ready to be directed into other activities. Dieting makes you fat. As you reduce your food intake to lose weight, your body put itself on 'famine alert'. Dieting was once practically a national pastime. In 1990, the same report found that 39 percent of women and 29 percent of men were on a diet.

Studies show that eating three healthy meals and two snacks a day can actually help you lose weight . By eating every three hours, your metabolism will stay elevated and you will burn more calories . Studies have shown that dieters perform worse when tested for reaction times, rapid information processing and memory. How on earth can you concentrate on anything when there are chocolate biscuits and bars to think about? Studies suggest that repeated cycles of weight loss and weight gain may also be harmful to your health, but no study has definitively proven that. If you've ever tried to lose weight or plan to diet in the future, you should know the ins and outs -- or rather the ups and downs -- of the yo-yo diet.

Exercise, combined with a healthy and nutritionally well balanced diet, is often the key to weight control. Exercise is another way to live a healthy lifestyle and may reduce the pressure felt by dieting. In some cases however, eating disorders do develop as a result of compulsive exercising.

Yes, your metabolic rate naturally slows down a little when you lose weight, but this isn't automatically because you've lost muscle. It's because when your body has less weight to carry around, it needs fewer calories. Yet -- ironically -- food is your best tool to gain and maintain energy, resolve, and clear thinking. You just have to do it right.

Healthy eating is about the big picture - an occasional splurge won't kill your efforts. And again, diets that are too restrictive are conducive to cheating - when you feel deprived, it's easy to fall off the wagon. Healthy diet and adequate exercises are the sure and safe ways to lose weight. Health authorities do set some baselines - these are 1200 calories per day for women, and 1800 calories per day for men. This doesn't really make too much sense - are you are sedentary person with little muscle mass?